Harold Holdsworth (Ninclow)
Irfan "Irving" Mostafa Shafiq is a half-blood, British-Egyptian wizard born to the British witch Harmonia Shafiq and an unidentified Muggle. Although conceived in England, Irfan grew up in north-eastern Africa as the son of the well-known Ali Mostafa of the Egyptian Centre for Alchemical Studies. During his formative years, rather than attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry like his mother did, he received his magical education in Africa. Among his stepfather's many friends were British Curse-Breakers employed by Gringotts Wizarding Bank, and since they permitted then to accompany them down into the tombs, Irfan grew familiar with exotic symbols from a young age. Biography: Family background: Parents Descending from a rather old, very respectable and relatively wealthy wizarding family boasting a long line of accomplished witches and wizards to their name, there was never any doubt whatsoever in the mind of Harmonia Shafiq that she would never be able to live up to the expectations of her parents. Aware that whatever her achievements, being a woman in a man's world was bound to put certain restrictions on what she would go on to accomplish in life. That is not to say that she was lacking in talent, however, which the assembly of scholars who had seen to her magical education mostly agreed that she was an academically gifted student, but it was men who achieved the greatest goals. The Shafiqs hailed from the the Middle East and could, after all, trace their lineage back to the great Arabian sorcerers of legend. And Harmonia knew, in her heart of hearts, that she was not the stuff of which legends are made. And it did not get any easier, of course, when she, against her better judgement, allowed herself to fall head over heals in love with a Muggle of all people. Decidedly less militant in their anti-Muggle sentiments than some of the other old pure-blooded families, Harmonia knew that her parents nevertheless would not take kindly to her having engaged in a relationship with a member of the non-magical world. Love, she knew, was only almost as important was a respectable marriage into upper-class wizarding society. And so, she kept her love life a well kept secret. When she, however, to her horror discovered that she was pregnant, she panicked: And who could blame her? She had yet to build up the courage to tell her dearly beloved what she was, and it was first now it truly dawned upon her how there was no guarantee that he would still love her afterwards. And what was worse: .Her parents, while not exactly wishing death and devastation upon the Muggle world would never accept the offspring of a Muggle as part of their family. And what, she then worried, would happen if the child turned out to be a squib? How, she pondered, could she look her parents in the eye knowing that her relationship with her beloved might have lead to her very magical family's decline? In the end, after several weeks, the pressure was too much for the young mother-to-be to bear, and she resolved to flee, escaping her old life in exchange for a new one in which she could raise her child to be something other than a social piranha. The opportunity presented herself when she met another Hogwarts graduate, a wizard who had during their school career been four years below her, but in the same house. Learning the chap had become an intern in the Department of Magical Transportation at the Ministry of Magic, she pleaded with him for help to get away. A Muggle-born and sympathetic to her plight, he warned her that if he did indeed help her, she would have to provide an object for him to bewitch, lest she wanted his superiors to discover he sat up an unauthorized Portkey for her, to which she readily agreed. On the day of her departure, about which she never gave any notice of to her parents, he was the only person aware that she would journey to the Middle East, hoping to find some sort of sanctuary with distant relatives of a lesser branch of their family that still lived there, and during the scandal that ensued following her mysterious disappearance, the only one who was privy to the secret knowledge that she was still alive. And it was while she trying to track down some distant cousins of hers in Burkina Faso that she would met her future husband, an affable if somewhat eccentric Egyptian wizard nine years her senior by the name of Ali Mustafa who was collecting samples of magical flora on the outskirts of the capital city of Ouagadougou. While initially only meaning to ask him for directions, the two ended up chatting for three hours straight, at which time Mr. Mostafa said he had to get back to work, but insisted that they had to talk some more the following day over a drink at the local wizarding inn, to which Harmonia was only too happy to comply. Within a month of their first meeting, Mr. Mostafa had introduced Harmonia to his parents, who both was happy to see their son find love. Fearful of how Ali would react to find out that she was expecting a child already before their marriage, she made sure that they had consummated before her belly grew big enough for him to suspect it. Irfan's birth Although a bit bemused by his wife's request for them to adhere to the ancient wizarding practice of consulting a Naming Seer for an appropriate moniker to their unborn child, a practice that is more widespread in Europe than on any other continent and frowned upon due to the potential risk of the predictions about their child's personality or future telling them something they would not want to hear. Nevertheless, both parents were rather glad that they did, as the name suggested, Irfan, were the Arabic word for "knowledge", and it was foretold that their son would grow up to become a man of great learning, to the delight (and relief) of both of them. A glance at the infant at the day of his birth was enough to tell Ali the truth, however, but certain in his judgement that she had not been unfaithful to him because the men she had associated herself with since they met in the main had been dark eyed, black haired individuals with a tan, leading him to suspect that his wife had been the victim of rape, owed in part due to her unwillingness to talk about her life in England, and resolved to treat the child as if it was her own, and never asked her about the real father out of fear of hurting her feelings. Early life Early childhood Born an hour or two after midnight on September 15. 1846 in the ancient city of Alexandria, where the man he raised to see as his father did quite bit of work for the Egyptian Centre for Alchemical Studies. Initially heading the local Owl Post Office in (town), when Ali Mostafa learned about how wizarding authorities worldwide intended to initiate a project aimed at sneaking life-saving magical discoveries into the pharmaceutical industry of the non-magical world without their knowledge, happy to join such a worthy cause. Having taken an academic interest and studied old writings in the past as a hobby, it did not take much reading for him to prepare him to approach the ancient science of alchemy on a professional level, in which capacity he and his peers sought to improve alchemical procedures used in the production of herbal medicines, an effort for which he was locally well-respected His mother, on the other hand, stayed home most of the time. While growing ever more accustomed to their way of life and increasingly fond of the culture, she ultimately fell short of her own ambitions due to a severe lack in knack for languages other than her own, making any sort of working arrangements rather difficult and leading to her reluctantly walking in the footsteps of her parents, albeit for very different reasons. As a result, Irfan learned to speak Arabic by his father and English from his mother, from whom he got his Brtish accent. And while she often kept her distance out of fear of being recognized and the word of her deceit reach her parents, Irfan would by contrast often hang around the workplace of local Curse-Breakers employed by Gringotts Wizarding Bank and, since many of them were friends of his father's and he himself was, in the main, a well-behaved and likable little boy and eager to learn, more than once toured in some of the tombs and learned quite a bit about Egyptian mythology and the ancient magic imbued in the very foundation of the burial chambers they worked to access to ward off intruders, and even got a souvenir every now and again. When he was nine years of age, his father brought him along on a work-related trip to Asia, where his father were to observe the experiments of local peers of his trade and retrieve a pre-ordered copy of an ancient scientific manuscript written by the renowned Dzou Yen in the Zhou Dynasty, which he meant to use as a pretext for his lecture on the field of Spagyric at the upcoming International Alchemical Conference in Cairo. Whilst there, Ali took Irfan to see the Great Wall of China as a treat and also took him with him to the tropical rainforest of the Jianfeng Mountain to sample magical flora not found elsewhere, an adventure that turned rather more exciting than they would have liked after they unwittingly had entered the den of a particularly ferocious Nundu. School career During his formative years, Irfan attended the Uagadou School of Magic located in the Mountains of the Moon in western Uganda, in a stunning edifice carved out of the mountainside and shrouded in mist, so that it sometimes appears simply to float in mid-air. Somewhat of an oddity at the school, being the only white student, Irfan's fluency in Arabic and working knowledge on Swahili helped him greatly in being accepted into the fold, as did it that both teachers and peers alike found him to modest, likeable, and reasonably talented. Throughout his attendance, he became well-versed in Astronomy and the theory of Alchemy, although he found the academical aspects of said subject far easier to handle than the scientific ones, to his great dismay. Even though many of his peers had adopted the wand as a useful tool, Irfan stubbornly refused to, proud to have been the first in his class to fully master the casting of spells by merely pointing a finger and through hand gestures. He later realized he had mistaken his teacher's lectures concerning however advanced his magic without a wand, there would always be certain kinds of magic that would be, if not impossible to perform effectively without one that certainly a lot harder, as a warning that using magic with a wand would mean a decline of his ability to exercise his gifts without one. Excelling in Charmswork and Transfiguration, however, the wand's ability to focus the magic of a wizard in a manner that made their spells more potent were one he would not come to fully appreciate until adulthood. Upon graduating, however, which he did with his above-average intelligence and ability clearly reflected in his impressive academic record, he decided to spend one last summer with his parents before he would proceed to take the traditional tour of the world, a prospect about which he was quite enthusiastic. Grand Tour As avid a fan of Quidditch as the next man, Irfan were disappointed to see there were only a few books to be retrieved that gave any real insight into the history of the sport in Arabic, and the closest thing available in English were a directory of the countless fouls one could commit in the game. As he half-heartedly skimmed it over the summer mere months prior to his departure, he found a footnote that barely touched upon a significant past event, prompting him to investigate further. While there, he visited the Norwegian Ministry of Magic where a letter from the medieval wizard Goodwin Kneen to his cousin Olaf describing an early form of "Kwidditch". On the day of his departure, Irfan lost his way looking for the scheduled port-key and found to his amazement that he had unwittingly stumbled across the Swedish boarder. Initially intending to go the back from whence he came to ask the Norwegians for another port-key, he caught a lucky break when he by a stroke of luck came across the only wizarding family in the area, who agreed to help him further on his journey, but not before he joined them the following day to see the annual broom race. Unbeknownst to him, part of the course led the competing riders straight through a Swedish Short-Snout dragon reservation, and upon realizing how few survivors it were, he decided never to attend that competition himself. Even so, he still could appreciate the warm meal afterwards. Irfan later wrote home telling of his journeys in Southern Asia, informing his father that whilst in India, he had gotten in a spot of trouble with their Ministry of Magic after asking for directions from a wizard who turned out to be a Snake Charmer and mistaken for knowingly consorting with a known criminal, although all ended well. Later, in Pakistan, to which Irfan had traveled to replace the flying carpet he had lost to the trolls, as the trade of such things flourished there. He soon left the Middle East, discontent with their dislike of Quidditch, but not before stopping by China to pick up gift for his father. It was during this quest that Irfan learned of and became enthralled with the the anthropologic concept of an honour-shame cultures and convinced him to spend further four weeks while studying the strictly enforced Japanese wizard's code, which strengthened Irfan's mistrust of Dark Magic. Curious to hear from a fellow weary traveler of a shop that specializing Category:Ninclow